


Ghosts

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Justified
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-06
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-08-17 08:45:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16513058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: The first ghost is the Boyd Crowder that never was.





	Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> This is what comes of me attempting to write a ficlet for Halloween and instead just writing Raylan being haunted by all the deaths that might have been. Borrows from canon for seasons 1 and 6.

The first ghost is the Boyd Crowder that never was. The Crowders struggle to have a child for years before having Bowman, who Raylan is occasionally forced to play with on account of his mama being at Nobles and his daddy and Bowman’s daddy having plans. Bowman is a spoiled, lazy boy who’s three sizes bigger than all the other kids in Harlan. He’s a bully, of course he is, a big Crowder boy like that, lumbers up and shakes kids down for their lunch money, knocks them flat if they don’t hand over their toys. There ain’t nobody around to keep Bowman in line, so Raylan uses his fists and gives it a try. He thinks it would be different, maybe, if Bowman weren’t an only child. ‘Course, he thinks that about himself, too. It would be different if Arlo had two or three kids to disappoint him, instead of just the one.

That first ghost is just the space between words, the pause the teacher takes to inhale between Marlene Connors and Johnny Crowder, the itch between Raylan’s shoulder blades as he waits for something that ain’t there. Raylan grows up tussling with Bowman Crowder and playing baseball with Johnny Crowder and picking fights on his own time, and if sometimes he glances over at the empty desk beside him in English class and feels the ache like a pulled tooth—well, Harlan is full of aches and pains. Being Arlo’s son has taught him that. Raylan Givens grows up alone in Harlan, and maybe that gives him the edge he never had before, the desperation to swing like his life is on the line and get that baseball scholarship taking him out of the hills. Maybe it’s what gets him killed, nineteen and down the shaft and alone in a cave-in, a boy who dies with his arm outstretched for something he can’t find.

Then there’s the ghost of Boyd Crowder at nineteen years old, caked in coal dust and blood down the back of his coveralls where the coal slab got him in the neck, hardhat still on his head and the lamp blinding in its glare. Raylan loses Boyd in the mine, that time. Raylan reaches out and holds on tight but that ain’t never been enough to save anyone. It ain’t enough to save Boyd. Raylan runs out of the mine and keeps on running, Boyd’s ghost following behind. Raylan goes to college, and Boyd tags along, out of place in a room full of kids who don’t smell of firedamp and ain’t covered in coal and their own lifeblood. Raylan joins the marshals and Boyd passes the time in training by telling dirty jokes at inappropriate times and standing too close to the recruits, making them shiver without ever knowing why. Raylan grows accustomed to the feeling of ice water running through his veins. He never did let go of Boyd.

Boyd at nineteen is cotton candy and dynamite, he’s soft lips and spun sugar that melts in your mouth, a lit fuse of a tongue and laughter like the sound of explosions in a fresh cut. Boyd aims the headlamp at Raylan’s face, but it’s the glare from Boyd’s brilliant grin that leaves Raylan rubbing his eyes.

The third time, Raylan kills him, and Boyd is thirty-nine and wearing a t-shirt and this time his blood is on Raylan’s hands. Boyd at thirty-nine is a racist asshole when he wants to be, and he takes pleasure in following Raylan around and spewing bullshit just to see how long Raylan can last before he takes a swing. Raylan punches a lot of walls, and his new coworkers watch him with wary eyes.

Raylan can’t ever get his hands on the third ghost, though sometimes, late at night, he tries. Boyd Crowder at thirty-nine slips away like cigarette smoke and mountain mist; he stands beside Raylan in the john declaiming nonsense about the Aryan race, and Raylan reaches out but can’t hold on. His hands are slippery with Boyd’s blood, and Boyd’s hands are inked coal-dark with all the hate he cultivated while Raylan was gone. The third ghost never stays, and he never quite looks Raylan in the eye.

Raylan Givens makes a name for himself as a straight shooter, as a man with a temper. It’s nothing he wasn’t famous for before. Boyd dead in Ava Crowder’s living room don’t change the course of Raylan Givens’s life. Except. Raylan never quite sets down his gun, after he kills Boyd. Winona comes to his hotel and Boyd stands between them and Raylan doesn’t let her in, doesn’t stop being angry long enough to father a little girl. Raylan holds on to his gun and his badge and Boyd Crowder’s ghost. That’s all he has, in this life. That’s all there is.

There’s the ghost Ava creates, of course, but Raylan doesn’t see him around all too frequently. Raylan expects that Boyd Crowder has other plans concocted. He finds Ava, four years later, and suspects he knows the origin of the dark circles under her eyes, the tremble in her hands when they brush against air gone ice cold. _He’s wearing a suit jacket, ain’t he?_ Raylan doesn’t ask. _And a shirt buttoned up to the collar, and that belt buckle he stole from his daddy’s house a year before_. Raylan isn’t planning to pry—he doesn’t need to borrow someone else’s ghosts.

Raylan has enough of his own. He likes the last one least of all: Boyd Crowder in a borrowed suit, covered in other men’s blood, dirt on his face and under his nails and sweat dripping down his face. _So what’s it gonna be, Raylan?_ Raylan shoots Boyd Crowder in cold blood, in a barn on a hillside in Harlan. Boyd had a gun. The official report says that he drew first. Only Ava could gainsay it, and she still runs and Raylan still finds her and Zachariah, four years down the road. She tells Raylan she feels safer, knowing Boyd’s truly gone, knowing he can’t come for her or his son. Raylan don’t say what it is that he feels. This ghost is quiet. It drifts in and out of rooms, most of the time, though sometimes Raylan will feel its anger like the twist of a tornado in the air, and once it shattered all the windows at the Miami office in a fit of rage. This Boyd Crowder is betrayed. Broken hearted. He was begging Raylan to shoot him, at the end. All Raylan did was oblige.

And he’d said he wouldn’t raise up his daughter any differently, having put Boyd Crowder in the ground. He’d told Boyd that she’d make her own path. And if he treats her like he might break her; well, that’s only because she’s so fragile in his arms. It don’t have nothing to do with the broken man standing in Raylan’s shadow. Nothing to do with the fact that he wants to keep the man that he is—the lines that he’ll cross—away from an unsullied little girl. Boyd doesn’t call Raylan out on his parenting, though. Boyd doesn’t say anything at all.

“Raylan Givens,” Boyd declares, and Raylan presses the phone hard against his ear, soaking up the sound of Boyd Crowder speaking for the first time in a long while.

Boyd Crowder is born the same year as Raylan. He works the same mine. He catches Raylan’s hand down in the dark and they run for their lives. Raylan shoots him and misses at thirty-nine. He doesn’t shoot at all, a few years later. Boyd goes to Tramble, and Raylan goes to Miami.

Boyd sees Raylan and smiles wide enough to dispel all Raylan’s ghosts. Raylan blinks away the glare.

“I hear you’re preaching again,” he says, urging Boyd to speak, and Boyd obliges.

Boyd lives and he lives and he lives and he lives. And Raylan? Raylan grows accustomed to hearing Boyd’s voice through the telephone, to the warmth in his chest when Boyd comes around the corner and smiles. Raylan holds Boyd’s hand when they’re children and he holds Boyd’s hand in the mines and he holds onto Boyd Crowder at thirty-nine in Ava’s dining room, at forty-two in an abandoned barn, at forty-six in a prison. Raylan never could let go of Boyd.


End file.
